Sandy Bowl After Big Pot

Sandy Bowl, the seventh millionaire trotter in harness racing history, will try for the biggest financial coup of his career Friday night at Sportsman`s Park.

The race is the $354,533 Breeders` Crown Aged Trot, a 10-horse contest with a cosmopolitan flavor, a dash of intrigue and a $177,276 pot for the winner.

Trotting tycoon Sandy Bowl has made $401,325 of his million in 14 races this year. The rest of the horses have combined earnings of $669,868 in 110 starts.

Besides money, Sandy Bowl has outstanding times, a lot of class, a little luck in the form of the inside starting slot and an intriguing Team Nordin entrymate, Keystone Edmund.

Team Nordin`s top rival figures to be a high-powered entry of Babe Kosmos, Why Not and Speed Merchant. Babe Kosmos has won four in a row, and in her last start, Sept. 10 at Garden State, she took a photo finish from Sandy Bowl in 1:55 2/5, world-record time for a trotting mare.

Sandy Bowl`s class is evident from his having won major races on each of the three commonly used track sizes: a mile circumference, a half-mile and five-eighths of a mile. Among those triumphs is a 1:58 4/5 effort over five-eighths of a mile in the American-National Aged Trot June 1 at Sportsman`s.

``I think Sandy Bowl has a great chance,`` said Jan Nordin, the Swede who trains Team Nordin`s horses in collaboration with his father, Soren. ``In the American-National, he showed he can handle the turns. The last race (his loss to Babe Kosmos) did him good. He hadn`t raced in a while (two weeks), and he wasn`t as sharp as he could have been.``

Sandy Bowl`s driver will be John Campbell, whose horses have amassed $13.2 million in purse money the last two years. Jan Nordin will pilot Keystone Edmund, the most intriguing horse in the race because he hasn`t engaged in parimutuel competition in 14 months and made only three betting starts last year.

What`s a horse like him doing in a race like this?

``Keystone Edmund is an extremely high-capacity horse,`` said Jan. ``His qualifier (1:57 3/5 Sept. 7 at Garden State) was a very good race. We know he`s able to come back from a layoff and race big. The horse is very, very quick.``

The longshots in the field include two foreign horses: Canada`s Garland Lobell and Sweden`s Evita Broline, a mare who won one of the European Grand Circuit`s elite races in Italy earlier this year.

Sportsman`s Aged Trot is the first of 10 races in the Breeders` Crown divisional championship series for pacers and trotters that will be staged at nine tracks in September, October and November. It`s the most lucrative race for older horses in harness history and the richest race in Illinois since the inception of the parimutuel sport in 1946.